Tuesday, January 14, 2014

My take: A healthy doctrine of creation and an understanding of the image of God in humanity plays a huge role in this discussion. I commend her post to you.

From her post:

“Beauty has been rejected as a standard to live by and as a map to guide us. Yet without the map of beauty…, ‘we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which human life is no longer clearly perceivable.’”

The above quote comes from a chapter about the life of Vincent van Gogh in Jim Belcher’s book, In Search of Deep Faith(he’s quoting Roger Scruton here).* Belcher describes Vincent’s messed up life: rejected by family, blaming himself for his father’s death, fighting with those who tried to love him, depressed, poor, and selling not a single painting in his entire life. That brokenness nurtured in Vincent a sense of not just the trite fads of the day, but a deep, broken beauty acquainted with failure and suffering.

I’d like to be a person who recognizes and values that kind of beauty.

Finding that kind of beauty happens in little everyday choices. Lately I’ve been researching what kind of waffle maker to buy. My readings of many product reviews have taught me that the options for waffle makers are much like the options for most things you buy these days:

Pay a cheap price, and get a cheap quality thing that’s made to give you a momentary thrill of purchase and then fall apart.

Or, pay a significantly higher price and, if you’re lucky, get something that works, maybe even something crafted. For waffle makers, for me that looks like a locally made cast iron waffle maker you can use on a stove top. Reveiwers glowed over this thing. It even inspired a utube video. People call it a keepsake for future generations.